So much to catch up on and share, but let’s start with “the dumbest goddamn student I ever had” — I presume you’ve seen this by now?  We really have to impeach this man, fast — our country and world are in peril.  But you know that.

Did you know that a volcano […]

Not using his last name, for reasons that may become evident, but the breakfast where we’re staying is free, included in the price of the room, and today is our last day here — I have learned to say “you only live once” in Italian — at a resort so fancy it sports a Michelin-starred […]

Not presidential?  Here’s what Obama did to get people upset (he wore a tan suit).  Contrast that with what Trump has done?  And now he wants ten times as many nuclear weapons? Everywhere we go we apologize for him — to cabbies and waiters and busboys, to the train station information lady, to the […]

In case the six-minute Nick Hanauer TED talk I keep linking to hasn’t persuaded your uncle, now comes Marcus Ryu to seal the deal.  Please read and forward.

. . . I am what certain politicians call a “job creator.” Two recessions ago, in 2001, five partners and I founded a software company […]

As our vulgar, incompetent, egomaniacal president — our “national embarrassment,” as Colin Powell put it long before he, Trump, came within 3 million votes of his opponent (with the help of a massive post-KGB disinformation campaign) — as he seems poised to wreck the deal  by which we halted Iran’s rush to nuclear weapons, Madeleine […]

If everything has gone according to plan, a friend and I have hurtled through the air across an ocean, dining, sleeping, and waking to eggs Florentine — all this and first-run movies on a 500-ton double-decker — and are now, as we speak, checking out the Colosseum, where two seconds ago in the scheme of things 65,000 […]

Jim Burt: “Of all the daily Republican outrages, the one that’s getting the least attention in proportion to the danger it holds – in my opinion – is the ongoing destruction of the Affordable Care Act by deliberate sabotage: the diversion of public funds appropriated for the purpose of promoting enrollment to propaganda against […]

So what do you think of the death penalty?

Even if you’re for it in some circumstances, what do you think of imposing it as the punishment for consensual gay sex?  Too harsh?

So what would you think of a UN resolution calling for an end to that?

And — the real question — what […]

Here’s the Warren Buffett story.  The kinds of stocks I own are mostly “special situations” — but make no mistake: in a bear market, everything goes down.  So it’s arguably a mistake to hold stocks in advance of a bear market (except: what if you’re years early in selling, plus the taxes you might […]

So Saudi women are going to be able to drive — a small but hopeful sign.

Islam is at war with itself.  It is desperately in the world’s interest to have the forces of modernization win.

With that in mind, I commend this remarkable 6-minute clip — Shiite clergyman calls on Muslims to imitate […]